How to Build an Alarm Clock That Can Only Be Silenced by a Nerf Dart

The most dangerous object in your home isn’t the stove, the clothes iron, or that chainsaw in your garage. It’s your alarm clock’s snooze button that makes it so easy to go back to bed each morning. Silencing that alarm shouldn’t be so easy, so Christopher Guichet built an alarm clock that can only be deactivated with a perfect shot from a Nerf blaster.

But Guichet didn’t just build some Rube Goldberg-type contraption to simply press the ‘snooze button’ on his smartphone. He instead built an LED wall clock from scratch, with a custom Arduino-powered sensor in the middle programmed to only respond to the vibrations delivered by a Nerf dart fired from his bed. So when the alarm sounds in the morning, he has to accurately hit the target, forcing him to wake up and get out of bed.

You can take a stab at building your own, as Guichet goes into a lot of detail about how he made his alarm clock in this video. Just keep in mind he spent every weekend for three months working on it, which is time that could have probably been better spent just napping and catching up on sleep. [YouTube via Make]